Inside the mostly sane world of mystery writing

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Recently, I heard a writer describe her editor as “the person who puts the hyphen in anal-retentive.” Had the editor been there, I’m sure she would have been beaming at such a compliment.

Some writers think editing is easy; others know better, especially after their manuscript comes back marked up. Editing deals from the small (hyphens, capitalization, and other minutia that can only be learned after having spent a lot of time with The Chicago Manual of Style) to greater issues of whether a character’s name is suddenly something else or a scene in the story is bogging down… Continue reading